


the waves

by confidantes



Category: Katekyou Hitman Reborn!
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-08-12
Updated: 2015-08-12
Packaged: 2018-04-14 09:19:21
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,675
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4559199
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/confidantes/pseuds/confidantes
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>She is a buoy caught in the strength of his current. </p><p>(A look at Chrome and Mukuro's relationship before Chrome's introduction in the manga.)</p>
            </blockquote>





	the waves

**Author's Note:**

> wow i wrote this more than a year ago and I KNOW the khr fandom is probably all but dead considering it's been years since the manga ended but i found this today and like it enough to show it to the world so why not. enjoy

-

 

 

Her body is a scion of Poseidon.

 

 

Sometimes she has dreams of his Vindice prison, of his hair in spools around the murky water, of tubes that snake his arms like the way fish get tangled in jellyfish nettles. When she wakes, instinct dictates that she clasp her sides in fear of what is not there. When she wakes, the first breath is terror, the second remembrance, the third relief. 

The feeling of being connected to someone is  _new_ to her. After all, she’s been alone all her life. To be tethered, to depend on someone, to have someone depend on her, this is all unfamiliar territory. She doesn’t know how to feel about being kept alive because someone else is being kept dead – almost thinks that all things considered, it was better off this way.

 

 

M.M. is the first to lay hands on her. 

“Why the fuck should we believe you, you little pig?” She grabs her by her hair, fistfuls of bluish black, twisting (like her sneer). “How do we know you’re not just gunning after Mukuro-sama, huh?!” Pulls her up to her face until they’re nose-to-nose. “Are you mute? Say something, you little bitch!”

“Careful,” Chikusa says calmly, pushing his glasses up with a steady finger, “no blood on the carpet, M.M.”

She’s trembling, lips quivering, but she manages to make out a few words: “M-Mukuro-sama t-told me that this will dispel your doubts.”

Holding out her left hand – a staff slowly materializes from her palm, growing, tall, until the tip splits threeways and three prongs arc from its stem.

There’s a vague fish noise as three mouths pop open. M.M. lets go of her hair.

“What the fuck is your name, anyway?” Ken growls.

She manages to smile.

“Chrome. Chrome Dokuro.”

 

 

They don’t treat her with any more warmth in the coming weeks, however.

They give her a room in this broken down compound of a school and not much else. Vines creep the walls, the concrete bends sleep into her spine at night, and the trident on the floor next to her is the only friend to keep her company for miles around. 

She whispers, “Mukuro-sama,” and the words flutter into a flickering shape of the man himself, shadows thrown against the wall.

For now, that is enough. 

 

 

-

 

 

“Did you make this place all by yourself?” He leans down, bends towards a tall flower, and takes in a deep breath. “Incredible. The senses are almost fooled.”

The girl isn’t particularly scared of him, which doesn’t surprise him. For all she knows, he might as well be a figment of her imagination. But her eyes – he hadn’t expected to see such eyes again. He had expected to leave those eyes behind, in a past tormented by syringe needles and screaming children strapped to gurneys.

Her eyes look dead.

He chuckles. “Don’t worry,” he says, sticking his hands in his pockets, “I’m just passing through.”

She watches him leave.

 

 

When he returns, her eyes seem a little brighter.

“I was hoping you’d come back,” she says softly.

“Ah yes,” he says with a smile, “out of all the dreams I’ve seen, none seem so quite as bright as yours." 

The flowers bloom beautifully behind her.

"What is your name, girl?”

She is quiet before saying, “Nagi.”

“Nagi,” he repeats. “What an impressive imagination.” The smile he wears reminds her of a Cheshire Cat. “Nagi…I may have use for you yet.”

 

 

(If you are Cheshire, am I Alice?)

 

 

-

 

 

She is used to this – alone in her room, painting the air around her with her imagination. Except this time, her thoughts come to life. The foxes she makes leap across the ceiling float down to nuzzle her in the face, and she giggles at the fur brushing her nose. 

When she is done playing with the animals, she tries to materialize Mukuro in the corner of her room.

The shadow comes together and falls apart in a mere second.

She smiles sadly.  _Of course. While I am alive, you are dead._

_When you are alive, it will be my turn to die._

 

 

She remembers the accident –

a screech (the tires or the cat?), a blunt force, and then a heap of bones crushed against warped metal.

The thought,  _ah, perhaps it is better this way anyhow, Kami-sama._

 

 

Her family never even wanted her.

Mother calls her an accident; fifteen and pregnant and forced to marry the thirty year old man she’d been sleeping with has made her heart bitter and the lines in her forehead a chiseled feature. These days, she tries to pay her dues working a secretary job at some high-rise company, and she still screams at Nagi for the noise she made when she was a little girl, sober or not. “You were always a selfish little girl, Nagi!” “Selfish! Always crying for something or another!” “What a nuisance. What an inconvenient child!”

Father is too tired to file for divorce papers, and his parents had insisted on making the marriage work, after the last wife made trouble. When she asks her father for something, he waves a hand and tells her, “Don’t bother me, right now, okay? Ask your mother, probably.”

Mother calls her an accident, Father wishes she never even existed, and Daughter plays with the shadows and imaginary shapes the light has thrown in the corners of her bedroom.

Nagi has learned the art of silence, of zipping up, of keeping quiet, of disappearing through the walls.

 

 

-

 

 

Other times, she dreams of his smile.

Just his smile.

 

 

-

 

 

Mukuro had told her that the baby would come for her one day, and lo and behold, he was right.

She smiles at Reborn. “I was expecting you, Reborn-san.”

The baby grins back. “Why am I not surprised? That Mukuro has always been dangerously sharp. Anyway, I suspect he’s already told you to accept my offer, but I am here on formality.”

She continues to smile, a painted thing on her dollish lips. “I am sorry I cannot offer you any hospitality right now.”

At this, the baby frowns. He glances around her concrete room. “Ah, yes, that is something that bothers me…from the looks of it, Mukuro’s Kokuyo lackeys already lack trust in you. If they were to find out you accepted the offer to join the Vongola…”

She shakes her head. “Thank you for your concern, but Mukuro-sama’s wish is my wish.”

“Said with such pride, too.” There’s a wry smile on his face. “Reminds me of another idiot teenager with life-or-death loyalty for their master.”

 

 

To their credit, the Kokuyo don’t kick her out.

Not yet, anyway.

 

 

She’s woken up one night by M.M. bursting into her room and shaking her shoulders.

“ _You bitch!_ ” she’s screaming. “ _You complete bitch!_ ”

Chrome says nothing – is caught speechless by the tears falling from M.M.’s eyes onto her cheeks.

“M.M.-san –?”

“Why is it you, huh? Why is it you who gets to talk to him, when Ken and Chikusa and I miss him the most? Why do  _you_ deserve that, someone he  _barely knows_ , when he saved  _us,_ when he sacrificed himself to those Vindice bastards for  _us?!_ Why are you the only one who gets to see him?”

M.M. is panting for breath, and in the moonlight spilling through the broken window, she looks afraid of what she’s just said.

Chrome swallows and says softly, “M.M.-san…I haven’t heard from him either…in nearly three weeks.”

A strangled noise erupts from M.M.’s throat, which startles Chrome. The girl clutches the front of Chrome’s shirt, eyes screwed shut.

“Why does it have to be  _you…_ ”

 

 

M.M. falls asleep in her arms, but when Chrome wakes in the morning, the girl is gone.

M.M. wouldn’t look her in the eyes for a week.

 

 

The trident is heavy in her hands, and she struggles to carry it with her full weight.

“Are you really ready, Chrome?” the baby asks dubiously. 

Is she ready? What a loaded question. Asking a girl who has never had a family, has never understood what it means to fight for others, who is half-dead and kept half-alive by a man kept far past his expiration date himself (a lifeline for a lifeline tethered to a lifeline), to put her life on the line for a  _famiglia_ she’s never even met.

Is she ready?

What a preposterous question. 

“Yes.”

(Her body is a scion of Poseidon and she is sinking cargo; on a wet summer’s evening she wondered what it meant to cry in an ocean already filled to the brim with saltwater.)

 

 

-

 

 

He watches her sleep, sometimes.

It’s hard for her to breathe – with every rise and fall of her chest comes a shuddering, labored sound, like she has already lost one lung and the one remaining is on its last legs. (She has. The doctors give her a few days to live, at most.) 

His body is not corporeal, but this should be enough. Pressing a hand to her chest, he imagines the organs that are missing from her body, and bring them to life, beating, pumping, squeezing.

When he takes his hand away, her breathing has become silent again.

Isn’t this strange? Tying this half-dead fate to her half-dead fate. In hopes that she may be his inverse, an exact mirror image except everything in negatives. In hopes of becoming two halves of a whole.

(Mukuro, admitting to being incomplete without her.)

Her sleeping form, comatose, sails on through the night. He bends at the waist and instinctually swipes a strand of hair from her face. A whisper: “Did you know, Nagi? That you are the most important person to me right now.”

The truth within the lie. The lie within the truth.

He is but sixteen years old. Tongue so warm with mother’s milk he can’t tell which is which anymore.

He takes her hand, kisses it, and gently pulls her up.

“Wake up, Chrome, my darling. Wake up.”


End file.
